rational geekery

I’m not ideologically against war. We were right to intervene in the Balkans and we were right to halt the Nazis in 1939; but I have, since invasion was first mooted, rejected the war in Iraq.

As a libertarian I believe that direct external interference in the running of a nation should be resisted. This argument does not suggest that intervention to stop ongoing humanitarian abuses is wrong, but it does argue that intervention should be limited to ensure that the people have self-determination and are willing accept the new order of governance. This is why the Iraqi elections should not only be celebrated, but be followed by a timetable for the withdrawal of troops. If Iraq is to avoid a civil war, the abrasive presence of coalition troops must be removed.

If the Insurgency is to be vanquished militarily we need to send more troops, not the continuation of this pointless and ineffective war of attrition. However Bush refuses to muster more resources for his beleaguered generals, so the only option is dialogue with the Sunni Insurgency and a timetable for withdrawal. We have no choice.

Nial Ferguson a professor in History at Harvard wrote in the LA Times yesterday a withering deconstruction of the neo-Trotskyite neoconservative world-view: -

After the Iranian revolution, the U.S. played the balance-of-power game, treating Saddam Hussein as a useful counterweight. But dissatisfaction with this murky strategy prompted the so-called neoconservatives to devise a radical new strategy. The region could be stabilized (and the security of Israel enhanced) by a forcible democratic revolution, beginning in Iraq.

It was from the outset a strategy based more on political science than on history. The “democratic peace” theory states that two democracies are always and everywhere less likely to go to war with one another than two dictatorships, or a democracy and a dictatorship. The neocons inferred from this that a more democratic Middle East would be a more peaceful Middle East.

[…]

Yet history offers a salutary warning. Even a complete success in Iraq would leave an awful lot of non-democracies right next door, notably Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which is now the principal menace to stability in the region. In any case, what the democratic peace theory doesn’t tell you is the number of countries that have plunged into civil war after democratization.

Call this scenario the “win-lose” outcome. The U.S. wins in the sense that Iraq has successfully held two elections and a referendum. But the U.S. loses because democracy lays bare the deep differences between Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis.

You end up not with a democratic peace but with a democratic war as the Kurds take up arms to fight for independence and the Sunnis do likewise to reassert their traditional dominance.

[…]

Iraq could easily go the way of Lebanon in the late 1970s, only bigger and bloodier. And such a war could easily escalate into a regional conflict.

If the history of 20th century Europe is anything to go by, all the ingredients are now in place for the biggest conflagration in Middle Eastern history. The only good news is that the first thing to go up in smoke will be the theory of a democratic peace.